After you first complete Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII, you’ll unlock the “Hard” difficulty, game design director Yuji Abe and battle design director Nobuyuki Matsuoka revealed in a Famitsu interview.

Hard difficulty monsters will be stronger and drop higher-level abilities. There will also be items that are only sold in Hard mode.

Additionally, the number of each monster type living in the world of Lightning Returns is predetermined. When you defeat the last of their kind (properly known as the “Last One”), the monster will become extinct. Each Last One will be remarkably stronger than their counterparts, and depending on the monster, their behavior may differ as well. If you defeat a Last One, you might acquire rare items.

Depending on your play style, Lightning Returns will last 20 to 30 hours, according to Matsuoka. But if you trigger nearly all the continent’s events and don’t skip scenes, it should run about 50 hours, Abe added.

No, In fact if there wasnt any Lightning games the FF series would pretty much be dead

bloodiOS

Uh, no. It’s because FFXV isn’t coming out that Square has to keep on releasing these fillers.

Edit: Come on, why so serious?

King-Podigy-X

Because people can’t take a joke.

bloodiOS

Eh? And here I thought you’re playing the boke and I’m suppose to role-play the tsukkomi.

iam_yotbox

i got the joke lol

Kobracon

Considering you’ve always been against FFXIII and anything that has to do with it, its hard to tell when you’re joking especially in a FFXIII article.

Unless you’re telling us that everytime you went “Disgusting” or “ugh XIII” was a joke…

carrebeannut

i didn’t know if i can trust SE again, after load of bullshit.

https://www.youtube.com/user/GamingHeroTetsuya TetsuyaHikari

>If you defeat a Last One, you might acquire rare items.

What the hell do you mean I MIGHT acquire rare items? MIGHT? Seriously?

I basically commit genocide on an entire species and you’re telling me that there’s a CHANCE I’ll get something out of it. That’s just great. That means I could make an entire species go extinct and not even get the rares.

Whoever thought this was a good idea needs a swift kick to the shin.

http://lfdn.deviantart.com/ CosmicNova

Why so surprise? This is basically the same formula as in FFXIII when your forming for rare drops from monsters.

Yeah, the only difference here is, oh… I don’t know… Turtles don’t become EXTINCT when we kill them?!

EDIT: It’s like:

“Oh, you’re on your second playthrough now? That’s funny, lololol. Did you know that species you killed before, well… There aren’t any more left and you missed your rare, and there’s a trophy for getting that rare item as part of the collection? Have fun starting a new game, noob ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)”

Tigs Mcjagger

i know this is late ..

But …

The enemies respawn/populate every playthrough ..

Bobby Jennings

I’m sure you’ll get it 100%. This is just how they word these things.

Kobracon

Calm down. It can’t be that dumb. I’m sure what he means is that not all Last Ones will have something to give. Like if you kill all the level 1 enemies, you prolly don’t get anything. its things like making all the Cactuars or Behemoths extinct that will give you rare stuff.

EDIT: Pointing out a particular item in FFXIII. Some kind of ice bracelet or something like that. You could only get two of them in the whole game and you needed one to make something to complete your item collection, so if you sold them off because nobody was using them, you were shit out of luck.

Oh and don’t even get me started on being able to copy and transfer a save file, load it, but not allowed to save the game. Learned that the hard way when I brought FFXIII to a friend’s house, wanting to advance a little in it while I was over there and soon found out I couldn’t save my progress. Awesome.

Chestnut Bowl

The reminds me of the odd way to get the Zodiac Spear in FFXII.

Syltique

I love the idea that enemies don’t spawn indefinitely. Very original approach to monster spawning.

Josephl64

I like how they’re doing monster spawning, hopefully this will be a great sendoff to the XIII story

iam_yotbox

I wouldn’t be against this set number of each monster thing becoming a trend in FF. Makes it feel like every encounter matters just that much more.

new_tradition

I think I’ll stick to the Normal Mode for the first playthroughs. I don’t wanna struggle on bosses my first time through. I remember them mentioning the species extinction thing before, and again, it sounds pretty interesting. I guess the setting of the game makes sense for it to boot.

I can’t wait to see how they plan to end the game story, though. Half of me wants a cheesy happy ending, the other half wants a melodramatic ending with a bittersweet tone like FFXIII originally had.

Kobracon

If I read the article right, you can only go as high as Normal first and then unlock Hard.

And about the ending, I totally feel the same way….I really want a happy ending more though…

DriftSlave

I agree with this happy ending~

Kobracon

Oooh its like a twisted Pokemon game! Gotta kill’em all :D

Aldridge517

I think Far Cry 3 was a wasted opportunity of a twisted Pokemon game. Ubisoft could have teamed up with Game Freak and made Pokemon poacher DLC

Nitraion

So they kinda want to copied after diablo game…
just tell me there is random generated dungeon and i am okay to reply something like that